EHR Usability Issues Impact Pediatric Patient Safety, Research Finds

In an analysis of 9,000 pediatric patient safety reports from three healthcare organizations, researchers found that 36 percent of the reports were related to EHR (electronic health record) usability issues.

The research, published in the November issue of Health Affairs, and led by Raj Ratwani, Ph.D., director of the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, Washington, D.C.-based MedStar Health, and others, aimed to further understand the specific issues around why pediatric populations are uniquely vulnerable to the usability and safety challenges of EHRs particularly those related to medication.

To understand specific usability issues and medication errors in the care of children, the researchers analyzed 9,000 patient safety reports, over a five-year span, from three different healthcare institutions—two stand-alone pediatric institutions and one adult and pediatric institution that used Epic and Cerner EHRs (two institutions used Epic, and one used Cerner)—that were likely related to EHR use.

Of the 9,000 reports, 3,243 (36 percent) had a usability issue that contributed to the medication event, and 609 (18.8 percent) of the 3,243 might have resulted in patient harm, the researchers found.

“The general pattern of usability challenges and medication errors were the same across the three sites. The most common usability challenges were associated with system feedback and the visual display. The most common medication error was improper dosing,” the research revealed.

The researchers noted in the study that pediatric patients are uniquely vulnerable to EHR usability and safety challenges because of different physical characteristics, developmental issues, and dependence on parents and other care providers to prevent medical errors. For example, they offered, lower body weight and less developed immune systems make pediatric patients less able to tolerate even small errors in medication dosing or delays in care that could be a result of EHR usability and safety issues.

Although the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has policies to promote usability—such as requiring system developers to incorporate feedback from clinicians into software design and development and mandating the testing of twelve high-risk EHR functions that are primarily related to medication—the researchers noted that these policies have not made a distinction between adult and pediatric populations. However, the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 requires ONC to establish new voluntary criteria unique to EHRs used in the care of children.

For this research, the 9,000 reports—3,000 from each site—were reviewed to verify whether the events were related to the EHR and medication; determine whether EHR usability contributed to the event and, if it did, identify what the specific usability challenge was; identify the type of medication error; and identify whether the event reached the patient.

Of the 9,000 patient safety event reports that were collected, 56 percent were confirmed as being related to both the EHR and medication. Of these 64 percent had a usability issue as a contributing factor to the safety event, which amounts to 36 percent of the total 9,000 reports analyzed.

Of the 3,243 reports (36 percent) that had usability as a contributing factor, 19 percent reached the patient. Of these, 33 percent did not cause harm and did not require monitoring, 18 percent required monitoring or an intervention to prevent harm, 3 percent resulted in temporary harm, and the consequence was unknown for 46 percent, the researchers revealed.

One example of a usability issue that caused some harm was when a when a physician ordered five times the recommended dose of a medication without receiving an alert from the EHR, although the prescribed dose was outside the recommended range. Both vendor design and development, as well as implementation and customization, may be contributing to the challenges associated with system feedback, the researchers stated.

“To address this systemic problem, vendors and providers should consider developing more comprehensive design guidelines and use generalizable tools to assess usability and safety. The Leapfrog [computerized provider order entry simulation] tool, which assesses clinical decision support functionality, is one example of the types of tools that could improve the safety of implemented EHR products,” they said.

The researchers concluded, “To better prevent usability-related medical errors, the ONC could include safety as part of the voluntary certification criteria of EHRs for use with children and implement usability-related measures to assess EHR performance. Vendors and providers should use rigorous test-case scenarios based on realistic clinician tasks. Finally, the Joint Commission should assess EHR safety as part of its hospital accreditation program. The implementation of approaches such as these is needed to reduce patient harm related to EHR use.”

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Just a few months after Allscripts said it would be selling its majority stake in Netsmart, the health IT company announced today that private equity firm GI Partners, along with TA Associates, will be acquiring the stake held in Netsmart.

In 2016 Allscripts acquired Kansas City-based Netsmart for $950 million in a joint venture with middle-market private equity firm GI Partners, with Allscripts controlling 51 percent of the company. With that deal, Allscripts contributed its homecare business to Netsmart, in exchange for the largest ownership stake in the company which has now become the largest technology company exclusively dedicated to behavioral health, human services and post-acute care, officials have noted.

Now, this transaction represents an additional investment for GI Partners over its initial stake acquired in April 2016, and results in majority ownership of Netsmart by GI Partners.

According to reports, it is expected that this sale transaction will yield Allscripts net after-tax proceeds of approximately $525 million or approximately $3 per fully diluted share.

Founded 50 years ago, Netsmart is a provider of software and technology solutions designed especially for the health and human services and post-acute sectors, enabling mission-critical clinical and business processes including electronic health records (EHRs), population health, billing, analytics and health information exchange, its officials say.

According to the company’s executives, “Since GI Partners' investment in 2016, Netsmart has experienced considerable growth through product innovation and multiple strategic acquisitions. During this time, Netsmart launched myUnity, [a] multi-tenant SaaS platform serving the entire post-acute care continuum, and successfully completed strategic acquisitions in human services and post-acute care technology. Over the same period, Netsmart has added 150,000 users and over 5,000 organizations to its platform.”

According to reports, Allscripts plans to use the net after-tax proceeds to repay long-term debt, invest in other growing areas of its business, and to opportunistically repurchase its outstanding common stock.

More than a third of primary care physicians reported all three measures of EHR-related stress

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Physician burnout continues to be a significant issue in the healthcare and healthcare IT industries, and at the same time, electronic health records (EHRs) are consistently cited as a top burnout factor for physicians.

A commonly referenced study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2016 found that for every hour physicians provide direct clinical face time to patients, nearly two additional hours are spent on EHR and desk work within the clinic day.

Findings from a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical InformaticsAssociation indicates that stress from using EHRs is associated with burnout, particularly for primary care doctors, such as pediatricians, family medicine physicians and general internists.

Common causes of EHR-related stress include too little time for documentation, time spent at home managing records and EHR user interfaces that are not intuitive to the physicians who use them, according to the study, based on responses from 4,200 practicing physicians.

“You don't want your doctor to be burned out or frustrated by the technology that stands between you and them,” Rebekah Gardner, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School, and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “In this paper, we show that EHR stress is associated with burnout, even after controlling for a lot of different demographic and practice characteristics. Quantitatively, physicians who have identified these stressors are more likely to be burned out than physicians who haven't."

The Rhode Island Department of Health surveys practicing physicians in Rhode Island every two years about how they use health information technology, as part of a legislative mandate to publicly report health care quality data. In 2017, the research team included questions about health information technology-related stress and specifically EHR-related stress.

Of the almost 4,200 practicing physicians in the state, 43 percent responded, and the respondents were representative of the overall population. Almost all of the doctors used EHRs (91 percent) and of these, 70 percent reported at least one measure of EHR-related stress.

Measures included agreeing that EHRs add to the frustration of their day, spending moderate to excessive amounts of time on EHRs while they were at home and reporting insufficient time for documentation while at work.

Many prior studies have looked into the factors that contribute to burnout in health care, Gardner said. Besides health information technology, these factors include chaotic work environments, productivity pressures, lack of autonomy and a misalignment between the doctors' values and the values they perceive the leaders of their organizations hold.

Prior research has shown that patients of burned-out physicians experience more errors and unnecessary tests, said Gardner, who also is a senior medical scientist at Healthcentric Advisors.

In this latest study, researchers found that doctors with insufficient time for documentation while at work had 2.8 times the odds of burnout symptoms compared to doctors without that pressure. The other two measures had roughly twice the odds of burnout symptoms.

The researchers also found that EHR-related stress is dependent on the physician's specialty.

More than a third of primary care physicians reported all three measures of EHR-related stress -- including general internists (39.5 percent), family medicine physicians (37 percent) and pediatricians (33.6 percent). Many dermatologists (36.4 percent) also reported all three measures of EHR-related stress.

On the other hand, less than 10 percent of anesthesiologists, radiologists and hospital medicine specialists reported all three measures of EHR-related stress.

While family medicine physicians (35.7 percent) and dermatologists (34.6 percent) reported the highest levels of burnout, in keeping with their high levels of EHR-related stress, hospital medicine specialists came in third at 30.8 percent. Gardner suspects that other factors, such as a chaotic work environment, contribute to their rates of burnout.

"To me, it's a signal to health care organizations that if they're going to 'fix' burnout, one solution is not going to work for all physicians in their organization," Gardner said. "They need to look at the physicians by specialty and make sure that if they are looking for a technology-related solution, then that's really the problem in their group."

However, for those doctors who do have a lot of EHR-related stress, health care administrators could work to streamline the documentation expectations or adopt policies where work-related email and EHR access is discouraged during vacation, Gardner said.

Making the user interface for EHRs more intuitive could address some stress, Gardner noted; however, when the research team analyzed the results by the three most common EHR systems in the state, none of them were associated with increased burnout.

Earlier research found that using medical scribes was associated with lower rates of burnout, but this study did not confirm that association. In the paper, the study authors suggest that perhaps medical scribes address the burden of documentation, but not other time-consuming EHR tasks such as inbox management.

Options include updating the Resource and Patient Management System technology stack or acquiring commercial solutions

With so much focus on the modernization of health IT systems at the Veteran’s Administration and Department of Defense, there has been less attention paid to decisions that have to be made about IT systems in the Indian Health Service. But now the HHS Office of the Chief Technology Officer has funded a one-year project to study IHS’ options.

The study will explore options for modernizing IHS’ solutions, either by updating the Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) technology stack, acquiring commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions, or a combination of the two. One of the people involved in the analysis is Theresa Cullen, M.D., M.S., associate director of global health informatics at the Regenstrief Institute. Perhaps no one has more experience or a better perspective on RPMS than Dr. Cullen, who served as the CIO for Indian Health Service and as the Chief Medical Information Officer for the Veterans Health Administration

During a webinar put on by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHERA), Dr. Cullen described the scope of the project. “The goal is to look at the current state of RPMS EHR and other components with an eye to modernization. Can it be modernized to meet the near term and future needs of communities served by IHS? We are engaged with tribally operated and urban sites. Whatever decisions or recommendations are made will include their voice.”

The size and complexity of the IHS highlights the importance of the technology decision. It provides direct and purchased care to American Indian and Alaska Native people (2.2 million lives) from 573 federally recognized tribes in 37 states. Its budget was $5.5 billion for fiscal 2018 appropriations, plus third-party collections of $1.02 billion at IHS sites in fiscal 2017. The IHS also faces considerable cost constraints, Dr. Cullen noted, adding that by comparison that the VA’s population is four times greater but its budget is 15 times greater.

RPMS, created in 1984, is in use at all of IHS’ federally operated facilities, as well as most tribally operated and urban Indian health programs. It has more than 100 components, including clinical, practice management and administrative applications.

Webinar

Regional Health knew providing leading EHR technology was not the only factor to be considered when looking to achieve successful adoption, clinician and patient satisfaction, and ultimately value...

About 20 to 30 percent of RPMS code originates in the VA’s VistA. Many VA applications (Laboratory, Pharmacy) have been extensively modified to meet IHS requirements. But Dr. Cullen mentioned that IHS has developed numerous applications independently of VA to address IHS-specific mission and business needs (child health, public/population health, revenue cycle).

Because the VA announced in 2017 it would sundown VistA and transition to Cerner, the assessment team is working under the assumption that the IHS has only about 10 years to figure out what it will do about the parts of RPMS that still derive from VistA. And RPMS, like VistA, resides in an architecture that is growing outdated.

The committee is setting up a community of practice to allow stakeholders to share technology needs, best practices and ways forward. One question is how to define modernization and how IHS can get there. The idea is to assess the potential for the existing capabilities developed for the needs of Indian country over the past few decades to be brought into a modern technology architecture. The technology assessment limited to RPMS, Dr. Cullen noted. “We are not looking at COTS [commercial off the shelf] products or open source. We are assessing the potential for existing capabilities to be brought into “a modern technology architecture.”

Part of the webinar involved asking attendees for their ideas for what a modernized technology stack for RPMS would look like, what development and transitional challenges could be expected, and any comparable efforts that could inform the work of the technical assessment team.